Save Us from Joe Biden

By Alan Caruba

There is, I swear, an entire category on Google titled “Joe Biden is an idiot.” As further proof, there are collections of Joe Biden quotes.

Addressing a gathering of the House Democratic Caucus on February 6, 2009, shortly after he and the President were sworn into office, Biden said, “If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there’s a 30% change we’re going to get it wrong.”

A growing majority of Americans has concluded that they got closer to 90% wrong, no matter what they did. The Obama administration is going to go into the history books as one of the worst the nation has ever endured.

That says a lot about Obama’s judgment because it was he who chose Biden to be his Vice President. Biden has turned out to be Obama’s alter ego and, we’re told, one of his most trusted advisors.

On October 12th, in Flint, Michigan, Biden actually said that there would be more rapes and murders if the current iteration of Obama’s jobs bill, yet another multi-billion dollar blunder, was not passed. Even a Democrat-controlled Senate would not pass it. In Flint this year, with no stimulus spending and 19 less stimulus police officers there are projected decreases in homicides of 42% and rapes of 52%.

It is worth pausing to keep in mind that, if Obama was to cease being President for any reason, Biden would become President. It is mind-boggling to think that this idiot could ascend to the office. If there was no other reason to defeat Obama in 2012, Joe Biden stands head and shoulders above all others.

How stupid is Joe Biden? Let me count the ways.

On October 23rd, in the course of a CNN interview, Biden said that nobody can say “that the stimulus did not create jobs.” Putting aside the fact that government does not create any other kind of jobs other than government jobs or make-work, temporary jobs, the most recent report on the stimulus by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) calculated that the stimulus did create a maximum of two million jobs by the fourth quarter of 2011, but that at a cost of $412,500 per job!

The CNN interview draw attention from some elements of the mainstream media when, according to a CBS political analyst noted that Biden “left the door open to running for president in 2016, saying he would “make up my mind on that later” adding that he was physically and mentally prepared for the challenge. Physically maybe, but mentally he is one of the most clueless vice presidents since the days of Al Gore.

“When the stock market crashed,” Biden told Katie Couric, “Franklin D. Roosevelt got on television an didn’t just talk about, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’” For the record, the market crashed in 1929 before Roosevelt was president and television did not exist except for a few experimental sets at the time.

Biden is famous for his gaffs, most famously for his comment, caught by the microphones, about the passage of Obamacare. “This is a big fuc*ing deal” during the signing ceremony on March 23, 2010. Since then, the House has voted to repeal the bill and it is headed to the Supreme Court after 26 States attorney generals challenged its constitutionality.

Biden is a buffoon, but worse than that, he has zero command of the facts and an alarming characteristic which he shares with Obama; he lies about everything all the time.

We can count on Biden, now that he and the president have hit the campaign trail, to say a lot of other stupid and false things, but we can also count on him putting audiences to sleep with his famed long-winded answers.

We must save America from Joe Biden for the same reason we must rid the nation of the worst president in its history.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

A Heartbeat Away

By Alan Caruba

At a dinner for Nobel Prize winners in 1962, President John F. Kennedy said that those present constituted “probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house except for perhaps those times when Thomas Jefferson ate alone.”

Given how poorly history is taught these days, it may come as a surprise that Thomas Jefferson was vice president to John Adams who had been vice president to George Washington. Adams tried to turn the vice president’s job into something substantial. The Constitution says only that the vice president shall preside over the Senate and, when necessary, shall cast a deciding vote in the event of a tie. His efforts to make something more of the job were defeated by the Senate of his day.

Jefferson heartily disliked Adams although later in their lives when both were out of public office they became good friends, corresponding daily with one another. Both died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Adams’ last words were, “Jefferson survives.”

To pass the time as vice president, Jefferson wrote the Manual of Parliamentary Practice, a guide that is still consulted today. “A more tranquil and unoffending station could not have been found for me” said Jefferson at the time, but he had plans to be president and would become our third.

In an entertaining new book about our nation’s vice presidents, “The Warm Bucket Brigade”, Jeremy Lott relates that, “The first two vice presidents were elected president outright, and twelve more veeps would end up, by hook or by crook, in the White House running things. The vice presidency has supplied a third of our presidents. For that reason alone, it’s worth losing sleep over.”

Although the office of vice president has gained in political power in recent times, it was an innocuous position for much of the early history of the nation until the 20th century. As Lott describes it, “If we wanted to create an office to trade prestige for ambition—a drunk tank for the power mad—we’d probably concoct something like the modern vice presidency.”

In the modern era, the vice president’s office gave us Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman, two relatively minor politicians before the death of the sitting president thrust them onto the world stage. Historians score both highly and it is interesting to note that Teddy Roosevelt was given the nomination to get rid of him politically. Truman was there to balance the ticket and because his fellow Senators respected his reputation for honesty and integrity.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was John F. Kennedy's vice president. Richard Nixon was Eisenhower's vice president on his way to becoming the only president forced to resign. Gerald Ford, Nixon's second vice president after Spiro Agnew was forced to resign, would succeed him into the office courtesy of the Watergate scandal. Those of us who lived through those years would probably prefer to forget them. They were exceedingly unpleasant, particularly since you had to live them one day at a time.

Prior to George W. Bush, his father, George H.W., served as Ronald Reagan's vice president before winning the job. Perhaps no vice president has had such influence as Dick Cheney, but he arrived with so much experience in Congress and inside the White House that few other men could rival his political gifts. We are not likely to see anyone like him again for a while.

No matter who you think won the vice president debate or who the robotic pundits of the mainstream media say won, it’s still useful to remember that whoever becomes the next vice president will, indeed, be a heartbeat away from being your next president.